UPDATE: Right after I posted this article, David Herrold told me (very nicely) that you can indeed turn device updates on for individual Twitter friends via the Twitter interface or by texting “on username” to 40404 from the phone number you’ve connected to your Twitter account. So you don’t need to convert RSS to SMS to get text updates from specific Twitter users. Still, the strategy I outline below is helpful for following Twitter search queries and hashtags via text messaging.

Technically, Twitter is designed with that frustrating 140-character limit so it can work even over the barest of bare-bones cell phones via text messaging. But even so, twittering by text messaging is cumbersome and a little financially risky.

A colleague e-mailed me with a Twitter question. She wants to use her mobile phone to send and receive tweets via SMS text messaging, but doesn’t have a data plan for her phone. (Hey, there’s a recession on, you might have heard.)

Yes, you can indeed read and post to Twitter solely via text messaging if you choose. I do think it’s a good idea to get set up to post to Twitter via text. You never know when you might need it.

The tricky part lies in receiving tweets via text messaging, while controlling costs…

Currently, Twitter only gives you the option to receive (via text message) either all tweets or no tweets from everyone you follow. When you turn “device updates” on from the main settings for your Twitter account, you run the risk of unpredictably running up extra texting charges, depending on the text messaging plan you have with your cell carrier.

Not to mention the annoyance factor of getting pinged every couple of minutes — or more frequently — depending on how many people you follow on Twitter, and how prolific they are.

I realize that there are far more people with bare-bones cell phones out there than who have smartphones or regular internet access. Why shouldn’t these folks be able to follow however many people they want on their Twitter account, while also exercising some control over the amount of text messages they receive from Twitter, to limit cost and annoyance?

I’ve discovered one possible hack to help in this situation.

There are some free services that convert RSS feeds to text messages. A free one I just tried out is Pingie, which I found on Lifehacker.

Every Twitter user’s account gets its own RSS feed. (Here’s mine.) Similarly, any Twitter search query also gets its own feed (like this one for the hashtag #homeless). When you set up a Pingie account, you can add to it any RSS feed. Once you have this set up, when a Twitter user you’ve added to your Pingie account tweets, the tweet goes out on their RSS feed. Pingie sees it, turns it into a text message, and routes it to your cell phone.

So if there are just a few Twitter users whose tweets you really want to get via text, or a few hashtags or search terms you really want to follow, you can use a tool like this to receive just those tweets . This is one way to control texting costs and annoyance.

…It’s not a perfect system, of course.

For instance, if one of your chosen few Twitter-by-text friends decides to post 100 tweets in three hours, you will receive all of them as text messages — and pay for them, depending on your mobile plan.

Also, as far as I can tell, you cannot delete a particular feed from your Pingie account via text message. So if a Twitter friend goes on an unexpected rampage, you probably won’t be able to stop the flood until you can access the Pingie site via a browser. Which could cost you money in the meantime, so there is still some risk.

And with Pingie you must add feeds individually. Depending on how many Twitter users or search terms you want to receive via text, this could be tedious to set up.

Finally, I don’t know how reliable Pingie is over time. I tried it, and it does work — but I don’t know whether it has outages, misses some tweets, or has other glitches or service delays. Also, other RSS-to-text services might offer different features.

Still, a service like Pingie at least makes Twitter less financially risky for people with VERY limited technology, web access, and budgets. A version of it more tailored to meeting that growing need might be surprisingly popular.

For instance, a surprising number of low-income and homeless people have cell phones that are SMS-ready, and also occasionally access the net from public terminals. What if a local social service agency used Twitter to broadcast announcements of services and opportunities, and also to solicit feedback from clients? What if a news organization set up a Twitter account that posts just a couple of headlines daily especially relevant to the working poor, or used Twitter to establish a dialogue with that community? The advantage of doing this via Twitter, rather than simply via direct text messaging, is that the content of these announcements and discussions would be more widely visible and findable as well as accessible.

Giving people more ways to exercise a certain amount of control over how much Twitter by text might cost them could create a whole new market for Twitter, and offer new options to people with scarce resources. And it might help make the Twittersphere a bit more economically diverse — which would be a cultural benefit and useful reality-check, I think. And social media might reflect society just a bit more accurately.

“Democrats want to use part of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout for emergency loans to help prop up the Big Three carmakers. General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC are seeking an infusion of $25 billion, a figure that several Senate Democrats embraced Sunday.

“Senate Democrats plan to introduce legislation Monday attaching an auto bailout to a House-passed bill extending unemployment benefits. A vote was expected as early as Wednesday.

“There’s a high degree of urgency” for federal action if GM is going to stave off a financial crisis, Rick Wagoner, GM chairman and chief executive, said Sunday in a joint appearance with United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger on WDIV-TV in Detroit.

“‘It’s really time to move on this,’ Wagoner said.”

That gets me thinking: The US auto industry is dying. It’s shown it can’t compete effectively with Japan and elsewhere for the manufacture of the kinds of personal cars people will be buying as the economy tightens.

Meanwhile, the lack of strong public transportation options is a growing problem in many parts of the US — particularly, lack of high-speed passenger rail networks, robust bus networks, and innovative flexible alternatives to car ownership (like car sharing programs and Zip Car hourly rentals). Exurban dwellers are notoriously hard hit by the transportation crisis.

So what if we bailed out the auto industry only if they shifted more of their production to vehicles that would suit these uses?

Yes, this would have to go hand-in-hand with a major shift in transportation policy that would support the expansion of public transit, especially outside urban cores and between non-urban-core locations. And so far local and state governments have been responsible for paying for public transit, and they haven’t had the cash.

Those are big, thorny issues — but they could shift. And if we’re even going to consider an auto-industry bailout, why shouldn’t we use it as an opportunity to fund a more sustainable transit system?

I suspect America’s “love affair with the car” might go the way of our love affair with cigarettes. It’s hard to stay in love with something that’s killing you and cutting off your children’s future.

That’s what David Cohn is trying to do with Spot.us, which launched yesterday. This project, funded by the Knight News Challenge, is attempting to support local investigative journalism through crowdfunding. Poynter’s Ellyn Angellotti described this project her recent centerpiece feature. Here’s Cohn’s short explanation of how Spot.us will work:

Yes, crowdfunding is a very different approach to journalism. And the unfamiliar always seems potentially dangerous. That’s why most mainstream media articles so far about Spot.us, like this one from the New York Times, include some variation of this caution: “Critics say the idea of using crowdfunding to finance journalism raises some troubling questions. For example, if a neighborhood with an agenda pays for an article, how is that different from a tobacco company backing an article about smoking?”

That’s a valid concern, but I think it must be considered in context…

1. Journalism has always had funding strings attached — often implicit, sometimes explicit. Great journalism has always been subsidized by people, organizations, or sectors with various agendas. And, more often than most journalists would care to admit, this has skewed coverage. This explains why so many newspapers have long offered meaty real estate, auto, travel, and lifestyle sections. It also explains why many news orgs take extra care (including, sometimes, outright avoidance) when covering news that might hurt the economic interests of big advertisers. To navigate this morass, most news orgs have devised processes (including the advertising/editorial firewall) that address internal conflicts of interest — not perfectly, but generally well enough.

2. Could crowdfunding actually work? We don’t know yet — hence, the experiment. And Spot.us is just one experiment; typically several experiments are required to fairly test a hypothesis. Leonard Witt analyzed the prospects of Spot.us according to Clay Shirky’s “three rules of crowdsourcing” test. (See Ch. 11 of Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody.) Witt thinks that so far, Spot.us succeeds on two of Shirky’s criteria: “Is there a plausible promise?” and “Are the tools effective?” Witt says the open question remains on the third: “Is there an acceptable bargain with the users?” I agree: This needs to be a good deal all the way around. That’s why the first few Spot.us projects should offer blatantly obvious value and impact to the Bay Area. Without great content, the model might be unfairly judged.

3. The traditional approach is broken, perhaps beyond repair. It has become glaringly obvious that ad-supported, mass-media news orgs — the key support infrastructure for most investigative and enterprise reporting — are in dire trouble. Alarming numbers of them are shedding staff and cutting costs fast, yet still remain in danger of folding entirely, sooner rather than later. While national-level investigative journalism will probably continue at the major news orgs left standing after this shakeout, local projects are very much in jeopardy. For this reason, more than any other, I think we need experiments like Spot.us. We cannot dismiss a community’s willingness to pay directly for investigative journalism without giving it a serious try.

(NOTE: I originally posted this on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)

So I’ve amended this post to reflect that information. My earlier advice to submit even if you still wanted to tweak your application was wrong, and I’m sorry for any confusion I caused.

——————–

This year I’ve been mentoring several people who are applying for Knight News Challenge grants. The deadline for applications is midnight on Saturday, Nov. 1 — so this is your last chance to toss your hat in the ring for this year’s round of funding.

I’ve noticed a few idiosyncrasies of the submission process that may confuse some applicants, so here are 10 tips to help you get your application in order…

1. Be patient! Site may be slow. Understandably, right now the News Challenge site is receiving peak traffic — so site performance is suffering at times. Sometimes it may take anywhere from several seconds to a minute or more for a page to load. I know this can be frustrating. However, if you’re submitting, commenting on, or rating an application, remember how important this process is and stick with it. Go get a cup of tea, take a deep breath, and be Zen about it.

2. Don’t wait until the last minute. If you have your application mostly ready, post it in their system and save it. However, DO NOT HIT “SUBMIT” until your feel it’s ready enough to be judged. Knight has already started judging (and in some cases rejecting) proposals submitted thus far. You apparently can continue to edit your proposal even after it’s been submitted — but you won’t necessarily know when the screeners have started to review it. Still, don’t run the risk that site performance problems in the hours or minutes before the deadline might interfere with your submission. Also, you want to have at least a little time to encourage people to rate and comment on your application. (See 8 below.)

3. To do anything, first register at the site. Whether you want to submit an application, or comment on/rate a submitted application, you need to first register with the site (free, fast, easy). You can’t do that on the home page, so go here and click the “sign up now” button (top right).

If you’re already registered on the site, you must of course sign in before you can do anything there.

4. The Garage is NOT the application. Many people took advantage of the News Challenge Garage to get community input on their ideas, in order to refine their proposals. However, if you have a project in the Garage, that does NOT mean you have officially applied for your grant. ASAP , you must submit a formal application here before the application deadline.

5. Editing required! Garage and application forms are NOT completely identical. When I was helping Tom Vilot submit his application for the Skyguy project a few days ago, we realized that some of the fields in the application form give you less space than the corresponding fields in the Garage.

Therefore, don’t assume that you can simply copy over your Garage project info into the application form. If you have more text in a Garage field than the application form allows, the application will truncate your info. So you may have to edit what you’ve already written — which can be difficult (even painful), but it is necessary.

Here are the character-count limits for key application form fields. Before you copy your Garage info into these fields, use the character count function in your word processor to edit your responses down to size. That’s much easier, faster, and safer than trying to edit text via Knight’s web-based form:

• Project title: 100 char.
• Describe your project: 1800 char.
• How will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities? 750 char.
• How is your idea innovative? (new or different from what already exists): 750 char.
• What experience do you or your organization have to successfully develop this project? 1600 char.

Also, be aware that (unlike in the Garage) the News Challenge application system appears to delete paragraph breaks. So, for instance, if your project description is 1799 characters long, but broken up into 4 paragraphs for easier reading, expect that after you submit it the site will display that text in one long paragraph. Yes, this is frustrating — probably as much for the screeners as for the applicants — but it’s the current reality of this system.

Therefore, when editing the text for your application, I recommend hat you enter it all as one big paragraph in your word processor. This will help you make it as readable as possible within that constraint.

6. Upload an icon. If your project has a graphic icon, make that your first of your five permitted file uploads associated with your application. Anything you can do to draw attention to your project helps.

7. Save as you go! The application form allows you to save your work as you go. Again, I recommend that you edit your text offline in a word processor for safety. However, once you copy edited text into the form, save it! And as soon as you feel it’s ready to be judged, submit it. You can continue to edit submitted applications, but you may not know when it’s being reviewed.

At this point, it’s unclear to me whether your proposal will be assigned a permalink (that you can direct people to) when it’s saved but not submitted — or whether people can rate/comment on saved-but-not-yet-submitted proposals. Try saving it and see if those features work for you.

8. Ask people to rate or comment on your application — NOW! I honestly don’t know how important ratings or comments are to Knight’s selection process, but since Knight does ask for these — and highlights the top rated entries, it’s logical to assume that they do factor into this process.

So after you submit your application, e-mail all your friends and colleagues. Give them the direct link to the proposal (the actual application, not in the Garage) and ask them to rate it and leave a comment. Let them know they must first register on the News Challenge site if they haven’t done so already. And ask them to be patient with the site if pages are slow to load.

If you used the Garage and received comments there, know that Garage comments are NOT automatically transferred to your application. It’s likely that the News Challenge screeners will review input on your project from the Garage, but I’m not 100% sure about that.

Therefore, I recommend that you contact the people who commented on your project in the Garage. Send them a copy of their comment, and ask them to repost it on your application — and again, give them a direct link to your application, and warn them the site may be slow-loading. Yes, I know this is a hassle, but it can’t hurt to ask…

9. Upload supporting materials. You can upload up to 5 files as supporting materials for your application. Each file can be no larger than 20 MB — but there are no restrictions on what kinds of files you can include. So, for instance, you might want to upload letters of recommendation or intent from organizations in your project’s target community to demonstrate that you have alliances in place to make your project work. Or a short video or audio recording (compressed to a suitable file size). Or you could compress several files into a zip archive to upload as a single file — such as for a collection of photos.

Of course, don’t go overboard with your file uploads. The News Challenge screeners have a LOT of applications to process. Expect that they’ll only check out your file attachments if they decide your project is worth a closer look.

10. DO THIS NOW!!! Again, waiting until the last minute may be risky, given the News Challenge site performance issues already manifesting. Take a little time today — right now — to edit your application and submit it through the News Challenge site. Waiting can only work against you.
…OK, that should get you going. Once again, do NOT wait until the last minute! Get your application online NOW!!!!!

And good luck!